Played in an NFL playoff game, no career regular season games

The NFL, unlike Major League Baseball or the NBA, has no roster deadline for playoff eligibility. Teams are allowed to sign free agents and practice squad players to the active roster and use those players in playoff games, even if those players never appeared on that team’s 53-man roster during the regular season.

This happens fairly often. In 2011, there were 9 such players, most notably David Binn, longtime Charger long snapper, who joined the Broncos just before their divisional round game with the Patriots. (Though the Broncos lost, Binn had a better day than another playoff-only long snapper did back in 2002.) These players are usually signed when a team suffers multiple injuries at a single position; it is probably not a coincidence that NFL teams with players who only appeared for that team during the postseason are a combined 44-58 in those games.

The 14 players in the table below are unique in that their only NFL game experience came during the postseason.

One thought on “Played in an NFL playoff game, no career regular season games”

Injuries can be very damaging to a player's career, just like those people who had the chance to be a superstar in the big leagues if they didn't get injured. It's a good thing that they received compensation even if they were sitting on the bench for a year or so. Well, if they can’t play, at least they can share their knowledge, with other players, not just on the court but even outside the court as well.

A potentially controversial sequence of events occurred late in the second half of the Packers-Falcons game when it appeared that two different players possibly threw punches that could’ve have warranted ejections.